Introducing the Stripe Corporate Card—a corporate card designed for startups and fast-growing companies. Set programmatic spending controls, reconcile expenses automatically using software like Expensify, and earn extra cash back where you spend the most each month. Sign up for the beta

Instant Payouts now available for US businesses—businesses in the US can now choose to receive funds into their bank account within minutes. Whether you deposit funds into your own bank account or pay out your platform’s sellers or service providers, Instant Payouts work 24x7, including nights, weekends, and holidays. Learn more

Express accounts are now supported in 28 new countries—Connect with Express accounts is the easiest way for platforms and marketplaces to onboard, verify, and pay out sellers and service providers. Express accounts are now available in 28 new countries in addition to the US and Canada. Get started

Stripe is now generally available for businesses in eight additional European countries. Businesses in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Greece, and Portugal can now sign up and use the full Stripe stack.

Since Stripe launched in 2011, tens of thousands of businesses across Europe have asked us to expand Stripe to their countries. This isn’t surprising by any means—Europe has one of the highest densities of software engineers in the world and thriving startup ecosystems are growing across the region. (As a company looking to grow the GDP of the internet, we’re also ardent fans of innovative initiatives like Estonia’s e-residency programs.)

With today’s launch, we want to help thousands more entrepreneurs and companies in Europe grow and scale their online businesses. As just a couple of examples of the breadth of businesses building on Stripe already: Andcards from Poland uses Stripe to automatically bill their customers across the world in local currencies; Click & Grow from Estonia uses Stripe to sell a smart indoor garden to a global customer base. Thanks to the hundreds of companies that helped us shape our product during our beta.

Earlier this year, we announced that we’d be taking a different approach to global engineering. Building global engineering hubs closer to our regional users helps us stay in closer sync with our customers’ needs and move faster. Today’s launch was built almost entirely by our engineering teams in Europe—everything from integrating with new financial partners to adding support for local legal entity types to handling non-Latin characters. If you’re interested in working with us to help build economic infrastructure, we’re hiring for many roles in Europe and beyond.

As part of Stripe’s environmental program, we fully offset our greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing verified carbon offsets. Starting this year, we’re going a step further. In addition to our offset program, we are committing to pay, at any available price, for the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and its sequestration in secure, long-term storage. We’re announcing this commitment to solicit technology partners and to urge other companies to follow suit.

We’re excited to announce that we’re launching our newest office in Mexico City. This office, our first in the region, will be home to teams focused on building products for the most ambitious technology companies in Latin America.

Internet penetration in Latin America is growing rapidly and the region will soon have more than 500 million internet users. Latin America’s e-commerce growth is outpacing any other region of the world. By the end of 2019, the number of Latin Americans buying online is expected to reach 155 million, up more than 23% since 2016.

Stripe is already working with some of Latin America’s most innovative technology companies, including Platzi, Rappi, Cornershop, Urbvan and Parafuzo. However, we’re just at the start of our journey here. With our office in Mexico City, we’re going to hire across a wide variety of roles, including engineering. Our initial focus will be expanding and adapting Stripe’s global payments and treasury network across the region. Over time, we expect teams in Mexico to build entirely new products in order to accelerate the growth of Latin America’s internet economy.

As a software industry, we’re still in the early stages of figuring out how global technology products should be built. Geographic concentration (especially on the West Coast of the US) has been the predominant mode. Mexico has a strong engineering culture and a lot of highly-trained local talent. By hiring in Mexico City, alongside the 14 other countries Stripe is hiring in today (including our remote hub), we plan to continue to adopt a truly global development model. Our aspiration is to build a world-class team here—tightly integrated with our global engineering organization to build products for entrepreneurs and businesses in Latin America and the rest of the world.

If you’re interested in working with us to help build Stripe’s Mexico City office, please get in touch.

Logging is one of the oldest and most ubiquitous patterns in computing. Key to gaining insight into problems ranging from basic failures in test environments to the most tangled problems in production, it’s common practice across all software stacks and all types of infrastructure, and has been for decades.

Although logs are powerful and flexible, their sheer volume often makes it impractical to extract insight from them in an expedient way. Relevant information is spread across many individual log lines, and even with the most powerful log processing systems, searching for the right details can be slow and requires intricate query syntax.

We’ve found using a slight augmentation to traditional logging immensely useful at Stripe—an idea that we call canonical log lines. It’s quite a simple technique: in addition to their normal log traces, requests also emit one long log line at the end that includes many of their key characteristics. Having that data colocated in single information-dense lines makes queries and aggregations over it faster to write, and faster to run.

Out of all the tools and techniques we deploy to help get insight into production, canonical log lines in particular have proven to be so useful for added operational visibility and incident response that we’ve put them in almost every service we run—not only are they used in our main API, but there’s one emitted every time a webhook is sent, a credit card is tokenized by our PCI vault, or a page is loaded in the Stripe Dashboard.

Platforms and marketplaces like RVshare, Lugg, and Qwick use Stripe Connect to onboard and pay their owners, movers, and hospitality professionals. Building a great experience for these people and businesses is key to a platform’s success, and we’ve consistently heard that user onboarding is one of the most difficult challenges platforms face. Based on user feedback and analysis of thousands of Express accounts, we made a number of updates to the Connect onboarding flow that drove a 5.3% average increase in conversion rates.

“With Express, signing up to get paid is really easy for our professionals.
The new UI helped us increase onboarding conversion by 17% and improved the overall user experience.”
— Trevor Baker, Director of Product, Qwick

Design improvements

It’s now easier for a platform’s users to fill out the onboarding form. A new progress bar shows users where they are in the process, and bigger form fields make it easier to enter their information on mobile devices. The platform’s brand is also much more visible in the form.

The new, improved Connect onboarding flow for Express accounts on desktop and mobile.

Better user guidance

When a user enters invalid information, they’ll get immediate feedback as they fill out the form. Improvements to field validation help ensure that users submit valid information, while keeping the form user-friendly.

When a user enters invalid information (like an invalid address), they’re prompted to update their information.

Accessibility upgrades

To provide the best experience for all users, including people who are blind or have low vision or motor impairments, we built the new onboarding flow and reporting dashboard for Express accounts to follow Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Implementing the latest standards in semantic HTML, labeling controls, keyboard navigation, and focus management helps users onboard and manage their payouts with a keyboard and screen reader, without compromising functionality.

Users can enter information and navigate rich menus with a keyboard and screen reader.Comprehensive labels and semantic HTML make our interfaces accessible to people who are blind or have low vision.

Localized flows

Creating a UI that’s tailored to your users’ preferred language and region makes your platform feel like a local business. The onboarding flow has been rebuilt to dynamically update whenever local requirements, laws, or regulations change across the world. This helps platforms quickly expand to new markets outside the US, without having to build new onboarding flows or worry about ongoing maintenance costs or compliance. Express accounts are currently available in the US and Canada, and we’re working on bringing them to more countries soon.

To onboard a French-speaking user in Canada, you'd need to localize the form to handle changes in field structure and validation, business entity types, and compliance requirements (e.g., in Canada, you can’t require collection of a Social Insurance Number). The Connect onboarding flow for Express accounts handles all of these considerations.

These are the first of many improvements we’re making to the Connect onboarding flow to improve conversion and help platforms save time, money, and development resources. To try the new onboarding flow for Express accounts, check out the demo, or read the docs.